Category: Things I Love Thursday

Last week I was in beautiful Southern California for the Natural Food Expo West in Anaheim California. I like that I didn’t bring boots, or a coat, or gloves. There was no need for hats or scarves. It was consistently around 20C, and sunny. I went outside in sandals. I had to get sun glasses. I got to go to Intelligentsia Coffee & Donut Friend with a friend. We also went to see the Space Shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center. Seeing the space shuttle was one of the most epic and awesome things I’ve seen in my life so far. This giant thing was actually in SPACE. Me and space are separated by one degree now (okay okay, I met an astronaut, so that was already the case, but still! So exciting) There was a 5-10 minute before you enter the shuttle room that just filled me with this incredible feeling of wonder and excitement. I felt pumped. The amount of work, hundreds of people did to get the Shuttle through the streets of Los Angeles to its final resting place. I got to try a lot of incredible new vegan products at ExpoWest. And brought home a bunch of samples. Tomorrow I’ll have a few highlights up from the event. I even won a big gift basket of mostly vegan Austin, TX stuff from the Bearded Brothers. While I loved being in Southern California soaking up sunshine and delicious vegan stuff that we can’t get here, I…

Travel As much as I love where I live, or as much as I always try to love where I live, wherever that might be, it’s always nice to leave the usual for a while. I enjoy the act of planning a trip, even a brief one, (& even if I’m not even going.) Part of me is convinced that my list of places and restaurants, and transit information will not just help me, but might help someone else someday, so that’s a major reason behind why I bother. It helps me, but one of my favourite things about the internet is that there is always the potential to share information that might be useful to someone else. I probably would have done well as a travel agent. Plus I love making functional lists. And checking them off. Or Google maps. With layers. Coming soon. Recipe for Change Later this evening FoodShare’s annual fundraiser Recipe for Change is on. It will be my third year going. JC and I have such a great time wandering around, taking pictures, eating, drinking, and checking out the silent auction items. We don’t make it out to a lot of fundraisers every year, but we make this one a priority. I’m really into the work that FoodShare Toronto does in the city, especially when it comes to teaching kids how to cook and prepare food, their work on school gardening projects, and their fantastic Field to Table school programs and workshops. Check this stuff out,…

This week has just flown by. I’m actually surprised it’s already Thursday, but it’s the time again. Things I Love Thursday! Weeee! APieCalypse Now! If you’ve vegan in Toronto, I’m sure you’ve heard, but in case you haven’t, APieCalypse Now! Vegan Bakery opened this weekend in the Annex. After having some trouble with old pipes and Toronto’s own experience with the Polar Vortex, JC & I finally got to really dig in to some delicious APieCalypse treats on Saturday during their grand opening. My pal Nicole did a great overview of the new bakery and space on her site (and I agree with everything she said), so I wont go into too much detail on the space other than the logo is amazing, and everything looks delicious. I got a bunch of yummy stuff, and was thrilled at the quality and service. (& I reviewed it on yelp) I’m really excited that there is a place that I feel 100% confident that serious thought has gone into making each item ethical, beautiful, and delicious. When I buy things, I spend a lot of time thinking about my purchases and how they impact humans and non-human animals, and I feel like I can really trust the effort that’s been put into making these products happen. One more thing I loved were all the free vegan & animal rights info cards (made & designed by the bakery owner) right at the front by the register. I’m planning on checking it out again later…

Yesterday was the 3rd anniversary of the day JC and I met for the first time. It just feels appropriate to post all about the day we sealed the deal (besides, it’s Thursday, so this is definitely one big Thing I Love). Let me tell you about our wedding in October. If you want to have a general run down of vegan wedding related stuff, please check out my posts for 2013’s VeganMoFo This is going to be long. Phew. —– The funny thing about writing a wedding post nearly 4 months later is that in retrospect everything seems better than it did in the days immediately following the big day. Now, I’m tempted to sugar-coat everything into a wonderful fairy tale wedding story where everything happens exactly like we dreamed it would, and nothing went wrong. I want to tell you that it was perfect. I do. But do you need to read about another beautifully perfect wedding story? There are enough out there I’m sure. Our wedding wasn’t perfect. Most things aren’t, but it was beautiful, and meaningful to us. We worked together to make an experience that was significant to us and our families. And I think we did the best we could with what we had control over – ourselves. While we were standing under the chuppah, in front of our friends and family, I felt like I was watching us standing there holding hands. It was like a dream. Here was my favourite person on…

Another week, another TILT. I feel as though I’ve been doing fairly well reflecting on all the things I love every week. I might not always post something, but it’s always on my mind. I did something last night that filled me with joy. I’m not going to say what it is, but it did involve random acts of semi-anonymous kindness. Sometimes when I’m feeling upset I want nothing more than to do something for someone else. The reasons are of course at least partially selfish though, because it feels so good to know that someone is slightly better/happier/etc because of something I did. Just a little thing, but it makes my life fuller to help. Last week I took a brief trip to London, Ontario, and I loved grabbing lunch with a PPK pal Ms. Naked Vegan Lunch, at Veg Out, and having fantastic conversation. I loved stumbling upon an AMAZING mural in downtown London. This is totally one of my favourite things from last week. It’s the Stephen Watson Memorial Mural. So colourful! So beautiful. And the most amazing thing is that I didn’t know it was there before I got there, and I wasn’t looking for it. I just started walking.around the city after my lovely lunch, and there it was. I was attracted by the colours and I had to take a closer look. The details were great. Other things I loved this week: Baking cookies Finishing difficult, but satisfying projects. Eating donuts from Through Being Cool: This is…

I mentioned this on Facebook, but earlier last week a friend us a picture from the new Tim Hortons in Liberty Village. A Tim Hortons location with soy milk. I wasn’t able to go check it out for myself until yesterday where JC and I have a standing Wednesday lunch date. The same friend that passed on the news initially, said that there was a new sign. A less exciting sign, but we opted to check it out anyway after lunch. We walked over to the Liberty Village Tim Hortons and saw the sign our friend was talking about. See what I mean? Neither of those interest me. I wondered if the soy was gone – so I asked, and the manager just happened to be there, and we asked about soy and they had a bunch (in case you’re curious, they’re using Silk Original flavour). He mentioned that their location, as well as a couple of others, were doing the soy thing independently. Corporate was okay with it, but not making it a regular thing (yet.) So of course, I got an iced capp. Post by Vegan In Your City. It’s sort of surprising to me that I would even write about Tim Hortons, the grand corporate entity that still dominates the Canadian coffee market. In all honestly, I am more likely to walk over to Balzac’s or Uma when I feel like getting a cup of tea or coffee, since I like the feeling of going into a…

Happy New Year! It seems so appropriate to put this into a Things I Love Thursday post. 2013 was one amazing year full of “Big Life Events”. JC and I bought a house. We got married. We started the year in Las Vegas, and ended it in New Orleans. Both of us travelled a lot, together and separately. I helped put together workshops on things I’m good at. I was part of creating a really successful fundraising campaign for an organization that means a lot to me. I went to more animal rights related demonstrations in 2013. I took more pictures than ever. I read more books. Cats. Always cats. Looking back on the year, it was a good one. I learned a lot, I did a lot, and ate a lot of new and interesting things, and had the opportunity to create things. The best part about taking stock of the year is both to acknowledge how much I managed to accomplish, and also start the year off with some idea of what else I’d like to accomplish. Turn any 2013 disappointments into 2014 opportunities. One of my biggest resolutions for 2014 is to do more of the things I love while also sharing more with the people I love. There are so many books I want to read. There are so many recipes I want to try. There are so many more things I want to learn about. I guess it can all just be summed up by:…

For 2014 – please go here. There are lots of general vegan gift idea lists out there, so please do check them out (I’ll link to some of them at the bottom of this post), but it’s worth looking locally to tap into the great community of creators and crafters, bakers, makers, and ingenuous entrepreneurs that we have in our city. There are also some wonderful organizations to support this time of year, as well as food and products to buy, made right here in the GTA. So this year, yet again, is my totally biased, occasionally random, list of local/GTA/Vegan Gift ideas. You’ll see some repeat names from last year, because they’re still awesome, but you’ll also see some new faces (because the vegan business community has really grown in 2013.) I welcome your suggestions for other local vegan friendly businesses and organizations to support, please add them in the comments. Vegan Food Apiecalypse Now! With exciting news just around the corner, there are also APieCalypse Now!’s mega awesome gift baskets to take advantage of. Available in both gluten free and glutenlicious varieties, in large baskets and in small, you have a lot to choose from. The baskets are full of almost entirely hand-made things, made with organic locally grown flour, fair trade sugar, and horizontal trade chocolate from ChocoSol (They’re even on the Food Empowerment Project’s Chocolate list.) Check out what else is on offer in the ApieCalypse Now! online store. (you have until December 15th to pre-order the big stuff…

This has been a really great week. I spent some of it feeling gross and yucky with flu-like symptoms, but even despite that, it’s been a great week. I started writing this on Thursday… but life got in the way. First of all, in “MeShell the Consumer” news, I ordered a couple of adult onesies from TopShop, which arrived this week. And, since I like to embrace my inner child, I’ve been happily wearing them around the house. When else do I have the opportunity to dress like a frog or a reindeer? Never. Board Games I played board games with vegan friends last weekend and it was pretty great. I never think of myself as a board game player or any tabletop game player, but when it comes down to it, I really enjoy them. One of my favourite memories from childhood is when my parents and I would play board games together around the dining room table. Usually it would be a fairly straightforward game like Payday or Aggravation (easily a family favourite) Hedgehogs I get to babysit a hedgehog for a little while. The best part is, I think my friend still thinks I’m doing her a favour… but really it’s the other way around. I don’t think I could commit to having a hedgehog full time (since, you know, cats), but there is something about their grumpy little sounds and mysterious personality quirks that does it for me. This grumpy ball of spikes is a hit at…

I’m glad I’ve got writing TILTs as part of my routine on Thursday. We’ve been back from our not-honeymoon for a few days and I feel like I’ve been playing catch up with the real world, projects, life stuff, house stuff, and foster cat stuff. West End Food Co-op CSO This week I picked up the remainder of the West End Food Co-op Community supported orchard program preserves I had amassed during the last CSO summer season. For anyone that has considered signing up but been put off by the initial cost – I think it’s worth it, especially if like me, you eat a lot of vegetables. Even splitting it amongst friends would leave you with lots of amazing preserves and treats for the rest of the year. The experience, the community, and the education at the WEFC Community Kitchen/Community Cannery is amazing. Future classes and events. On Tuesday, Doug McNish was also demoing his newest book Raw, Quick, and Delicious, so while I was there I picked up a free copy as a thank you for being one of the testers on this book. I’m not the most enthusiastic about making raw food usually – mostly because it’s typically so time consuming. So when testing for this one I was pleasantly and genuinely surprised at how actually quick (and delicious) many of the recipes I tried were. I’ll have to dig into the book again soon. Check out his demo on Breakfast Television Flowers My parents left Toronto while we…